She tosses me to the sewing machine in the corner. Then there I am. Crumpled up at the base of white remorse and silver dagger; pushing red thread through pale flesh. Two fingers down the throat, until it all comes out through the eye of the needle. It’ll come out with the needle through the eye, only we’ve rearranged the words instead of the brain this time. We’ve outgrown those old techniques, inhumane and elementary, and replaced them with the girl in the mirror and the other over her shoulder.
My skin is stretched tight around the ribs. The joints, my knees and elbows and fingers, protrude in a way that’s painful and sore. But now I’m changed and I’m better for it, I feel like empowered plastic with an extra-small smile. I’m cold and I’m better for it, I feel frail and now I’m too weak to lift myself off the hanger. I’m smaller and I’m better for it, now she can slip me off, and try me on, and wear me like she wanted to. She pulls me over her head and drops me on the bathroom tile. There I lay, paralyzed and bleeding bile, hands on the edge of the porcelain, knuckles blue and bent. Only here, only now, can I be sure that I am beautiful.
Feral in the barrel 